As a business professional like an accountant, engineer, manager, or executive, how do you select visuals for your important presentations?

You likely rely on the same graphs or diagrams that you have always used. Sometimes you grab a cool slide a colleague created and modify it. But how do you know if you are selecting the best visual to communicate the message you are delivering on each slide?

You’d like to use some of the effective visuals you see in business publications like the Wall Street Journal, but you don’t want to become a graphic designer. It would be great if there was a resource you could use to quickly select the right visual for any business message, with examples and instructions on how to create the visuals in the software you already use, Excel and PowerPoint.

Now there is. My book, Select Effective Visuals: The Business Professional’s Guide to Selecting and Creating Effective Presentation Visuals, is the resource you have been looking for.

Using the HVF approach in this book, you don’t need any graphics or design background to create an effective presentation visual. Follow these three steps:

Write a Headline summarizing your message

Select and create an effective Visual

Focus the audience during delivery

The majority of this book deals with the hardest step for business professionals: selecting the appropriate visual. After reviewing tens of thousands of slides and working for years to develop a repeatable method of selecting the appropriate visual, I have concluded that almost every message in a business presentation can be organized into one of six categories. Those categories can be further broken down into 30 groups and sub-groups. I’ve identified 66 visuals that fit into those groups and sub-groups.

The book walks you through each category, the groups and sub-groups for that category, and the visuals that fit into those groups and sub-groups. You see examples of the visuals, when it can be used, and get instructions on creating that visual in Excel or PowerPoint. In all, there are 196 color examples in the book.

You will increase your visual inventory. Right now, you only use the visuals you have seen. After reading Select Effective Visuals, you will have an expanded inventory of visuals to use in your presentations. And you will have the knowledge of how to create them in the tools you are already familiar with. There is no need to use graphics software or learn data visualization programming languages.

Here is a preview I put together that shows some of the visuals from the book.

If you are ready to get started using more effective visuals in your presentations, order your copy of Select Effective Visuals: The Business Professional’s Guide to Selecting and Creating Effective Presentation Visuals today.

Printed books available from Amazon and other book retailers (list price is $29.95 USD but retailers set their own prices):